Mike Ruangutai, Director of Engineering at Kareo, managed the engineering efforts at the company, from product to operations, project management to development. A rapidly-growing SaaS startup in the healthcare space, Kareo provided clinical and financial solutions to medical offices around the United States. These solutions were built on a web-based platform, however, Kareo had housed them in two different technology stacks—.NET and Java.

Kareo's medical information solutions were competing against traditional hard copy documentation, so convenience, accuracy and speed were critical to adoption. “Most doctors don't anticipate the downstream effects of using a pen and paper, and so our software has to be very performant as a result,” said Ruangutai.

Ruangutai wanted to get ahead of performance issues, so he and his team could address them swiftly. However, they needed to find an application performance management (APM) solution that could help Kareo track performance across two different platforms simultaneously.

“No other solution provided the level of insight into message queues that the AppDynamics platform does.”

Mike Ruangutai, Director of Engineering, Kareo

About Kareo

Kareo is the only cloud-based medical office software and services platform dedicated to small practices. Kareo offers an integrated suite of products and services designed to help small practice physicians get paid faster, run their business smarter and provide better care.

Its Practice Management software, Billing Services, and free, full-featured EHR help more than 20,000 medical providers more efficiently manage the business and clinical sides of their practice.

AppDynamics provided unmatched application insight

Kareo searched for a solution that could meet its unique needs. “I've used other APM solutions in the past and my experience with those solutions, given our current constraints at Kareo, is that they didn't provide the level of performance and insight - well, insight primarily - into what we needed to make sure our business is successful,” said Ruangutai. “That is the primary reason we chose the AppDynamics platform.”

There was a specific category of information that Kareo needed for successful performance monitoring and the only solution that delivered was the AppDynamics platform. “The other piece that is pretty critical to our system is the ability to evaluate messages in queues. Our infrastructure is predicated on messages and message queues, and no other solution provided that level of insight the way the AppDynamics platform does.”

Gained visibility into performance across architectures

“One of the key reasons the AppDynamics solution has been such a benefit to us is being able to track a transaction from one end to the other end and vice versa through the various architectures in .NET and Java,” said Ruangutai.

With that visibility, Kareo was able to better monitor and manage application performance. “So the AppDynamics platform has provided a lot of insight into a lot of our performance issues,” remarked Ruangutai, adding that the solution has, “added tremendous value in showing us where failed customer interactions are in our system.”

With the AppDynamics APM module installed, Kareo was able to identify some critical points in the system that impacted customer experience and monitor them closely. Ruangutai said that the ability to see if an area is not performing properly, “has been pretty critical to our business.”

“I would recommend the AppDynamics platform to any SaaS-based business, especially businesses that are predicated on a software architecture that is asynchronous in nature,” said Ruangutai. “The level of insight that the AppDynamics platform provides into such an architecture is critical, especially for transactions that are financial in nature. If you're running a business like this, I'd recommend the AppDynamics platform for you.”

“I would recommend the AppDynamics platform to any SaaS-based business, especially businesses that are predicated on a software architecture that is asynchronous in nature.”